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No one, we believe, will challenge one of the key propositions at the heart of our Leadership Development Kit: that individual leadership skills are best developed through practice and experience on-the-job. The plausibility of this claim drives the success of simple concepts such as 70:20:10, suggesting that the far majority of learning (like around 70%) happens through practice and only 20% through feedback and coaching, while formal training adds another 10% in relation to the other two (let’s mention in passing that there is no empirical evidence of 70:20:10 as far as we know – yet it still is a catchy concept and it doesn’t sound awfully wrong).

In many leadership development initiatives, however, training leadership skills off-the-job still gets the majority of program planners’ attention

Why? For one, it may seem more tangible to plan a training program than to define a true on-the-job approach based on action learning and individual initiative. Second, many large companies work with formal competency models. And it is straight forward and ‘reportable’ to tie a training agenda to those competencies. You can manage the agenda of a training to an extent that you can’t control what happens in action or in decentralized coaching and mentoring.

When focusing too much on training, however, leadership development efforts fail to realize their full potential. Above all, they miss the value of individual learners’ agency in setting priorities for themselves.

But even those initiatives who take on-the-job learning seriously suffer from common setbacks

One is overstretching. It has been shown that challenging assignments offer great learning opportunities for developing leaders. Challenging assignments push them to try new things in real-life settings. Especially first-time leaders experience the transition that they have to work through other people to make the organization successful (rather than do all the stuff yourself). However, if the challenge is too big – or if the individual is lacking support and opportunities to reflect and experiment –, they will find it hard to maintain their learning orientation. The fear of failure can become too strong to learn and develop. One risk is that they only engrain known practices, instead of trying new things.

Another common issue results from linking the performance management system with leadership development

Leadership development then becomes box ticking – been there, done that, reached this level, etc. Putting developing leaders in such a frame orients them towards abstract models instead of developing their own, authentic approach towards leadership. And, as with overstretch assignments, too strong a focus on performance kills the curiosity and learning orientation that is required to truly develop as a leader.

Effective development of leadership in contrast happens on-the-job, through feedback and reflection, and leveraging resources (such as knowledge, people, and time). As part of our Leadership Development Kit, we have defined a tool that leaders, or their coaches and mentors, can leverage to come up with ideas and actions to integrate leadership learning with actual practice on-the-job.

One of the seldom-noted side effects of various new forms of organizing is the enrichment of the language with which we describe organizations. Arguably, this broadening of the terminology itself supports organizational innovation …

Let's start with a hypothesis: Employee experience is what people will remember and tell others about the job and the organization ten years after they've left . If that’s true, there’s nothing wrong with benefits, perks, comfortable office chairs, etc., but those things probably don’t qualify as key drivers of employee experience.

In an earlier blog post, we argued that canvases, if well designed, support a new way of solving management problems. But how can we design a good canvas? We propose a few design principles – drawing on literature but above all on our experience of using the canvas format as part of our Kits …

Doubtlessly due to the pioneering work of Alex Osterwalder and his Business Model Generation model, canvases have become a novel approach to empower problem solving. This approach isn’t simply about a new set of tools – rather, it stands for a new way to tackle management challenges.

Can design thinking promote organizational responsiveness? I believe the answer is yes. Yet the interesting part is the process of getting to that answer and exploring the implications for new forms of organizing.

Managers seeking standardization and scale through functional specialization in unit structures should be aware of the potential downsides - and should consider a broader set of criteria in their organization design approach

Any initiative to develop organizational leadership capabilities should carefully consider its platform – the places, structures, bodies, and processes where you define and manage LD interventions in your organization.